


contemplating our careers

by kinnoth



Category: The Libertines
Genre: M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-21
Updated: 2009-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:50:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinnoth/pseuds/kinnoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This thing we have can't possibly, ever last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	contemplating our careers

**Author's Note:**

> pete POV first person twangst
> 
> I'm stuck on pre-fame libs and I don't know why.......

This thing we have - these best years of our life - are born out of secret desperation and misery, and can't possibly, ever last. The struggle grows stale, the discomfort grows old, and the suffering becomes less than noble when it loses its novelty and failure steps in, colder than a shit bedsit with a fucked space heater ever could be.

So I'm going to take everything I can now, Biggles; please don't think me selfish. Isn't it natural to want to be happy for as long, as intensely as possible? Isn't that why we blow our wages on fags and 7 inches and whisky when we could be having three squares? Isn't this why we spend our weekends passing around a bottle and a three stringed guitar when we could both be working proper jobs?

Are you happy, Carlos? Between your haunted days and stone frozen expressions and your manic frenzies on the rooftop, do you feel yourself at ease, of present, in love? I've never paid enough attention to you, I know; always caught up in the vines and roses and weeds of my own mind, though you've never blamed me of it, of anything, inattentive or otherwise. But I'm sorry for it anyway, Carl, that I encourage your unhappinesses by being simply too far away at the time to notice.

Do you remember how you once accused me of being like I'm everywhere at once? The entirety of the world, stretched across it like a hovering, boy-shaped blanket you can see even when you turn your face away, through the cracks of your fingers; like the sky, a broad and endlessly fertile blue that seems to swallow anything released into it.

I never told you, but if I'm the sky, Biggles, you're more like water, an abiding and glowering sea, tumultuous and opaque, but steady like clockwork, like the tide. And when you rage you are enormous, strength from beneath bitter depths; but when you calm you're almost languid, docile, like you might even let the odd beachcomber soak himself in your salty gentleness, when hours ago those smooth limbs had battered seasoned navigators, rent them into pieces in fierce and careless joy.

Being happy like we are, though, is like pulling the perfect pint every minute of every day. Fill it too shallow or too slow and the unhappy throat goes thirsty; over the top and it's just a mess. We can't last like this, on my tarnished romance and your reluctant idealism alone; music and poetry can fill lives, but it can't fill stomachs, nor hearts, at least not for very long.

So please don't mind me when I crowd into you under the sheets; don't punish me when I laugh a little too gently, touch you a little too lingeringly for brotherhood or boyhood or friendship. We are of _secret_ desperation, after all, though I'm no longer sure why mine is as much as it seems to be. You must be very blind, Biggles, to be unable to see this crowning jewel of all of my affections, or I must be very cloudy. Or perhaps my love shines not so brightly as I'd like to think, and perhaps you'll never know what words I hide into your hair when you're too exhausted to press yourself away.

But, Carl, you have made me happy; even if you aren't; even if all my songs for you never make a penny of the money we put into them in effort; even if you never notice.

I am happy, and I'll never stop hoping that you are too.


End file.
